‘Welcome to hell’: Inside the jail cell of Cynthia Vanier and her co-accused

Outside the El Cereso prison this week, visitors holding plastic shopping bags full of eggs and bananas lined up under a big yellow awning set up to shield them from weather that alternated between baking sun and sudden tropic showers.

Mothers, fathers, children, siblings, spouses and grandparents waited for hours to see the inmates locked up inside. But recently, among the callers to the jailhouse in Chetumal, an isolated town on Mexico’s border with Belize, were two RCMP officers.

The Mounties, both women, stayed long into the night questioning a pair of inmates separately in an upstairs office: Cynthia Vanier, a 52-year-old Canadian mediator; and her cellmate Gabriela de Cueto, 48, a Mexican-born San Diego real estate agent.

What alleged crimes they were investigating, they never let on but in an interview this week Ms. Cueto said their questions revolved around the cast of an alleged plot to smuggle Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s son Saadi to Mexico during the last days of the Libyan dictatorship.

In particular, Ms. Cueto said the RCMP officers had repeatedly questioned her about SNC-Lavalin, the engineering and construction company that funded Ms. Vanier’s controversial mission to Libya last year, and whose head office in Montreal was searched by Mounties last week.

Ms. Cueto is one of five suspects Mexican authorities have implicated in the Gaddafi smuggling conspiracy — wrongly, she maintained. While Ms. Vanier has given several interviews to select media outlets, Ms. Cueto told her story for the first time to the National Post.

For four hours, Ms. Cueto talked about how she became involved with Ms. Vanier, the betrayal she believed was responsible for her arrest and the torture she said she had suffered. Her lawyer sat in on much of the interview but neither police nor prison officials were present.

“I don’t blame Ms. Vanier or anybody else. I think I’m the victim of somebody’s interest. Plus, it’s a lot of excitement for the Mexican authorities,” she said, sitting at a table outside the cell block where she is confined between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. “I just hope that this ends soon.”

The sign at the prison gate says no cameras, no sunglasses, no mangoes, no grapes. The women’s cells are in a sunny courtyard with a volleyball net, hammocks and a pay phone. The cell that Ms. Cueto shares with Ms. Vanier and another woman is cramped but has a television and a basic bathroom.

“Welcome to hell,” Ms. Cueto said, greeting a reporter; she was wearing a short white skirt, blue top, red shoes, earrings and makeup. A white teddy bear lay on Ms. Vanier’s pillow but the Canadian never showed herself. A ceiling fan and two floor fans were fighting a losing battle against the midday heat.

Before she was imprisoned, Ms. Cueto said she had never washed a dish. Born in Mexico, the daughter of a federal judge, she moved to the United States at age 14. A wife and mother (one of her children is hospitalized), she runs a real estate business in San Diego’s upscale Coronado neighbourhood.

‘I didn’t see any problem. It was just a simple contract’

She is also a partner in GG Global Holdings, together with a retired member of the U.S. Marine Corps named Gregory Gillispie, whom she called “one of the most honest persons I’ve ever met.” Rounding out the company roster is Mike Boffo, also a retired serviceman, and Pierre Flensborg, a Danish citizen and former Texas nightclub owner.

The events leading to Ms. Cueto’s arrest began last July, she said, when Mr. Gillispie was asked to find a private jet for Ms. Vanier, who wanted to travel to Libya. Because Ms. Vanier had asked for a plane with a non-U.S. tail fin number, Mr. Gillispie asked Ms. Cueto if she could find one in Mexico.

Ms. Cueto said she wasn’t sure why Ms. Vanier was going to Libya, then a battleground between pro-Gaddafi forces and NATO-backed rebels. “What I was told is that they are going to Africa, to a humanitarian mission, and I remember Greg telling me UN, it was a UN Mission.”

It wasn’t a UN mission. Nor was the Canadian government involved. Rather, Ms. Vanier had a contract with SNC-Lavalin to assess the security situation in Libya, where the multinational had stopped work on its construction projects and pulled its staff out of the country because of the civil war.

To find a plane for Ms. Vanier on short notice, Ms. Cueto went to Bertha Esquino. The two had become close friends in San Diego in the late 1990s and sometimes called each other sister, she said.

When Mrs. Esquino went into labour, it was Ms. Cueto who drove her to the hospital, she said. When Mrs. Esquino was abused, Ms. Cueto stood up for her, threatening to call police unless it stopped, she said. “I tried to help her because I felt bad about her,” she said.

And when Bertha’s husband, Christian Esquino, was deported to Mexico in 2007, after serving two years in prison for fraud and suspected by U.S. drug enforcement agents of ties to the Tijuana cartel, Ms. Cueto kept in touch with Mrs. Esquino.

As a result, she knew things about Mr. Esquino, his troubles with the law and that he was living in Mexico under a new name, Ed Nunez. “I knew so much, a lot,” she said. “I think I was a risk for him because I knew his past.”

Nonetheless, when she was searching for an airplane for Ms. Vanier last July, Ms. Cueto went to the Esquinos. “I didn’t see any problem. It was just a simple contract.”

But it didn’t turn out to be that simple.

Although Ms. Cueto said she was unaware of it, Ms. Vanier had hired an Ontario security contractor to accompany her. His name was Gary Peters, and he claims he had been working on a plan to fly Saadi Gaddafi and his family out of Libya to a house in Punta Mita, Mexico.

When Ms. Vanier’s team landed in Kosovo, the staging area for her mission, the troubles began. The pilots panicked when one of Ms. Vanier’s security team told them they might have to fly into Libyan airspace and land on a road for an “emergency extraction.” They refused and it never happened.

Mexican authorities now allege the trip was part of a plot to bring Mr. Gaddafi to Mexico, but Ms. Cueto insisted the term extraction has been misinterpreted. She said it was simply a backup plan in case anything went wrong. “Extraction means vamonos,” she said, using the Spanish term for “let’s go.”

‘They came in the middle of the night to interrogate you, they threaten you, they torture you’

After returning from Libya, Ms. Vanier said she would need to return repeatedly to Libya over the coming months, Ms. Cueto said. GG Global brokered two more planes for Ms. Vanier, one of which was to fly to Kosovo to be available for an “emergency extraction” in Libya or Tunisia, according to the terms of the deal.

On Nov. 11, Ms. Cueto was arrested in Mexico City, the day after Ms. Vanier’s was taken into custody. At the time of her arrest, Ms. Cueto was with Stéphane Roy, a senior SNC-Lavalin executive who has since left the company. Ms. Cueto said she had planned to meet Mr. Roy to broker a deal between Lavalin and Mexico’s national water commission.

She was held at a detention centre in Mexico City where conditions were deplorable, she said. “They came in the middle of the night to interrogate you, they threaten you, they torture you,” she said, adding her interrogators threatened to arrest her family and kept her in the dark for long spells. “They psychologically torture you big time.”

Only when she saw the details of the allegations did Ms. Cueto realize the Esquinos had been co-operating with Mexican police. She said she was shocked by what she read. Mrs. Esquino had testified that Ms. Cueto had sent her an email and that attached to it was a scan of Mr. Gaddafi’s passport.

“I did not send it,” Ms. Cueto responded. “I was flying when she says I was sending that email.” She said Mrs. Esquino had access to her email account. “She knew my password.” She said she did not know how Mrs. Esquino would have obtained a copy of Mr. Gaddafi’s passport.

Ms. Cueto also denied telling Mr. Esquino last September that his planes were to be used to bring Mr. Gaddafi to Mexico. “That’s not true,” she said. “My understanding is the man [Saadi Gaddafi] is extremely wealthy. He has his own airplanes. Why does he want to charter airplanes? Why does he want to come to Mexico in the first place?”

The way Ms. Cueto sees it, the Esquinos made a deal with Mexican authorities: they would help with the Gaddafi smuggling investigation if police would overlook Mr. Esquino’s legal troubles. If so, it didn’t work because Mr. Esquino was arrested in Mexico City last month. He could not be reached for comment but he earlier stood by his testimony.

Ms. Cueto and Ms. Vanier were transferred to the Chetumal prison on Feb. 1. Both face charges of attempted human trafficking, falsification of documents, use of falsified documents and organized crime. Mr. Flensborg and an alleged Mexican documents forger named Jose Luis Kennedy Prieto also face charges.

‘I never did the things they said I did.I think she’s innocent, 100%. I think she may be a victim of something or somebody’

Their lawyers are appealing and Ms. Cueto said if the Esquinos’ evidence is discounted, which she said it should be, the case would collapse. “I never did the things they said I did.” She said she was also convinced Ms. Vanier had been wrongly accused. “I think she’s innocent, 100 per cent. I think she may be a victim of something or somebody.”

At an April 3 summit in Washington, D.C., with Prime Minister Stephen Harper and President Barack Obama, Mexican President Felipe Calderon cited the Gaddafi smuggling case as an example of successful security co-operation against transnational crime.

“The attempt to take to Mexico one of the children of Gaddafi, this implied an international and very North American operation because it was headed up by a Canadian businesswoman, who hired an American company, which hired in turn Mexican pilots and counterfeiters,” Mr. Calderon said at a news conference.

As young prisoners salsa danced behind her to a boom box, Ms. Cueto said the comment meant that even though she has not yet gone to trial, her guilt has already been judged from on high. “It worries me that somebody has decided my destiny,” she said.